Songs of Love and Death

closed, and his black eyes never blinked. I wasn’t certain he had lids. Nor did I question why I could suddenly see him so clearly, as though light shone upon his rotting face.

My finger tightened on the trigger. I let out my breath slowly. My heartbeat was loud. I could feel my pulse, my blood, bones beneath my skin. But I still did not fire, and the creature in front of me stared and stared, motionless. I tried to remember what he had looked like when he was still a man, but that face was a blur. Dead now. All of us had died a little, and become something new.

I heard another groan. Henry strode past me. Bodies stepped in his path. He did not stop. I heard a snarl and a ripping sound, followed by splashing. I smelled blood. The creature in front of me never moved, though the others behind him swayed unsteadily.

“Amanda,” Henry called out hoarsely.

I tightened my grip on the shotgun, and sidled sideways, never taking my gaze from the leader, the once- man. A rasping growl rose from his throat, but that was the only threat; and none of the others came near me.

Henry stood beside a massive tree, a giant with a girth that reminded me of a small mountain rising fat and rough from the earth. Roots curled, thick as my forearm—cradling a body.

Steven. He was pale, wasted—and bleeding. So much blood, dripping down his skin into the soil, as though he was feeding the tree. Maybe he was. I heard a sucking sound in the roots, and when Henry bent to pick up his brother, I grabbed his shoulder, stopping him.

“Watch our backs,” I murmured, all the hairs on my neck standing up as I knelt beside Steven and set down my shotgun. The boy’s chest jerked with shallow rasping breaths, his fingers twitching in a similar rhythm. His wrists had been cut open, as had his chest and inner thigh. Cats sniffed his body, ears pressed flat.

My palms tingled. I almost touched him, but stopped at the last minute and laid my hand against the tree. I didn’t know what I was doing, or why, but it felt right.

Or not. A shock cut through me, like static on wool—but with more pain, deep inside my skull. I tried to pull away, but my muscles froze. And when I attempted to call for Henry, my throat locked.

This is what you want, whispered a voice, reverberating from my brain to my bones. This is what you need.

A torrent of images flashed through my mind: open human mouths screaming, echoing in the air of stone streets bordered by towers made of steel and glass; men and women staggering, falling, slumped in stiff, decaying piles as blood and rotting juices flowed between cracks in the road, or in grass, upon the roots of trees that grew in shady patches. Bodily fluids, watering the earth.

Heat exploded in my chest. I could move again. I grabbed awkwardly at Steven’s clothes, hauling him off those roots. Henry helped. My muscles were weak. So was my stomach. I leaned sideways, gagging. Cats pressed close, dozens, surrounding me.

“Amanda,” he said.

I shook my head. “Use your shirt to wrap his wounds. We need to stop the bleeding.”

He did as I asked, but glanced over his shoulder at the pale bloated bodies waiting so still in the shadows. “What about them?”

I hardly heard his question. I stared at the spot where Steven had been sprawled—a cradle made of roots— and suffered the weight of all those trees bearing down on me, as though full of watchful eyes, and watchful souls, and mouths that could speak. Steven’s blood was invisible against the bark, but I felt its presence.

Something changed us that night, I thought, and those once-men stirred as though they heard, coughs and quiet groans making me cold. They had laughed, before. Laughed and shouted and sung little ditties, and made hissing sounds between their teeth. Horror swelled inside me—mind-numbing, screaming horror that I was here, with them, again—but I fought it down, struggling to regain that spectral calm that had stolen over me.

Henry touched my shoulder. “We can go.”

Steven hung over his shoulder like a dirty rag doll. I picked up the shotgun but did not stand. I held up my finger. “Give me blood.”

He hesitated, glancing wildly at the monsters surrounding us. I knew what he was thinking. Any minute now they would attack. Any minute, they would try to rip us to pieces and feed on our bodies; as in life, so now in this twilight death. I didn’t understand why they waited—though I had a feeling.

“Please,” I whispered.

Henry’s jaw tightened, his gaze cold, hard—but he leaned forward and bit my finger. Blood welled. I touched the tree.

And went blind. Lost in total darkness. I could feel the sharp tangle of vines beneath me, and hear Henry breathing—listened, with a sharp chill, to wet, rasping coughs—but those sounds, sensations, might as well have been part of another world.

Another world, whispered a voice. We are more than we were.

My finger throbbed. I bowed my head. Pressure built in my stomach, rising into my throat—nausea, but worse, like my guts were going to void through my mouth.

Instead of vomit, my vision returned. I saw those dead bodies again, endless mountains of corpses sprawled on stone streets, and the sun—the sun rising between towers, glowing with crisp golden light. Beautiful morning, with clouds of flies buzzing over blood that was still not dry.

We were born from this, said the voice, which I felt now in my teeth, in my spine and ribs. Blood that killed made us live.

Time shifted. Again, I witnessed blood, and the fluids from those decaying bodies flow and settle, feeding the roots of grass and weeds, and the trees that grew from stone inside the dead city. I felt a pulse sink beneath the streets into soil and spread. I felt heat.

A rushing sensation surrounded me—as though I was being thrust forward, like a giant fist was grinding itself between my shoulder blades. Faster, faster, and all around me, inside me, I felt a surge of growth—my veins, bursting beyond my skin, branching like roots, bleeding blood into the darkness.

Blood, that became a forest.

A forest that swallowed a city.

Many forests, I thought. Every city swallowed.

And the blood spread, whispered the voice. The blood changed us all.

As it changed you.

I slammed down on my hands and knees, as though dropped from a great distance. Fire throbbed beneath my skin, a white light burning behind my eyes. I remembered that night, naked and bleeding, on the ground—Henry screaming my name, Steven sobbing, both of them beaten bloody—and I remembered, I remembered a terrible heat. I remembered thinking the men had set me on fire, that I would look down and find my skin burning with flames.

We tasted all your blood, whispered the voice. We tasted a change that needed waking.

So wake. And feed us again.

I opened my eyes. I could not see at first, but the shadows coalesced, and became men and trees, and small furred bodies, growling quietly. My hand was still pressed to the blood-slick roots of the tree, and something hummed in my ears. I felt… out of body. Drifting. When I looked at Henry, I saw blood—and when I looked at the monsters who had been monsters, too, while they were men, I also saw blood. Blood infected; blood changed by something I still didn’t understand.

The trees are alive, I thought, and felt like a fool.

The leader of the pack shuffled forward and dragged his clawed fingers over his face with a gape-mouthed groan. He cut himself, so deeply that blood ran down his skin and dripped from his bloated cheek. I heard it hit the ground with a sound as loud as a bell. And I imagined, beneath my hand, a pleasurable warmth rise from the bark of the tree.

“Henry,” I said raggedly, without breaking the gaze of the pack leader, the first and last man who had held me down, so many years ago. “Henry, put Steven down. You’re going to need your hands.”